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[DefaultUrist]

Hello. I have problems with my dwarves equipping armor:
1. If I set up "wear armor over clothes" they don't equip gauntlets / boots
2. If I set up "armor replace clothes" I get this behavior of dwarves:
- when it's time to train dwarf drop all his clothes (where he stays at the start of order)
- he successfully equips all armor
- go to train
- when order ends dwarf run to armor stand and store armor (and weapon) here
- run to where he dropped off all his clothes and equip them
- run to place where I store finished goods (crafts) and store some of his crafts here (when he equip craft it's not belong to him)
- starts the cycle of dropping items -> equipping armor -> store crafts -> equip all
Some times he do work between steps
One more thing is other dwarves store armor from armor stands into armor bins.
I want to understand what is wrong.
I'm using DFhack but didn't change anything to ownership of items.
Barracks have cabinet/chest/armor stand/weapon rack for each dwarf of the squad, each of these dwarves have cabint/chest in his bedroom.
What I expect of dwarves:
- after order go to barracks/bedroom and drop of his/her clothes (crafts/other items) here
- go to barracks (if armor already here) or grab new armor from armor bins
- after order ends go and store all armor/weapon in barrack (no other dwarf touch this armor to move to storage)
- go and equip all stored items
- do all this once and not run back and forward and storing/equipping items non-stop

I want to set up scheduled training with "armor replace clothes" for all my 200 dwarves but it's super annoying to watch how all fortress trying to equip and store armor/clothes.
Any solutions / suggestions what am I doing wrong? Any workaround? I've tried to look for known problems but never seen this kind of issues...

[Bumber]

Don't have your soldiers store their armor while off duty? There's no good reason to ever not be wearing it.

[Telgin]

What Bumber said is the only real workaround.  If your soldiers are always equipped with their gear, you don't have these problems and they're faster to respond to problems on top of being prepared if they happened to get jumped by something.  It's a win-win to just keep their equipment on at all times.

It does slow them down if they're wearing a lot of armor and that can impact the speed that they do other jobs, but to me it's not worth the tradeoff.  Maybe if you're trying to put your entire fort in staggered training squads it would be a hassle to make enough gear for them all, but even then I'd just work my way up to that point instead of setting them to only wear equipment when on duty since as you've discovered it doesn't work well.

Equipping military gear and picking up clothes have had a lot of problems since at least as long as I've been playing, which was .31.25 like 13 years ago.  Some things have gotten a bit better, but it's still a mess of dwarves dropping clothes in random places that nobody can haul because they own the clothes, then putting on their socks and nothing else before hauling a boulder up 10 flights of stairs and getting angry that they're naked.

[DefaultUrist]

What are the settings so dwarves will always wear armor? Won't they have bad thoughts of this?

[Telgin]

I can't run the game right now to get a screenshot, but I think it's under the training orders somewhere.  When you edit the training schedule, there's an option for Equip/Always vs. Equip/Orders.  Toggle that each month that the squad is off duty and they'll wear armor all of the time.

As far as I know it doesn't trigger any bad thoughts.  The extra weight and slower movement are the only downsides.

[Vilkku92]

What are the settings so dwarves will always wear armor? Won't they have bad thoughts of this?

]As far as I know it doesn't trigger any bad thoughts.  The extra weight and slower movement are the only downsides.

Some dwarves might get bad thoughts about not being able to acquire something new/wear something fancy as they won't wear anything not explicitly part of their uniform, and since armor won't degrade over time like clothing does they won't be equiping new stuff very often after a certain point. Wearing armor doesn't itself cause any, though.

[Salmeuk]

Equipping military gear and picking up clothes have had a lot of problems since at least as long as I've been playing, which was .31.25 like 13 years ago.  Some things have gotten a bit better, but it's still a mess of dwarves dropping clothes in random places that nobody can haul because they own the clothes, then putting on their socks and nothing else before hauling a boulder up 10 flights of stairs and getting angry that they're naked.

this. it has never functioned correctly, and successive updates tend to shift the bugs from one interaction to another.

 i have since taken to roleplay interpretations of why my soldiers will, not infrequently, arrive to battle minus their most important equipment: they were too fucking drunk to care

[BlueTrillium]

It's fiddly yes, but I've not had too many issues (so long as I follow all the steps whenever needed). Is it a bug/can the coding be improved? Absolutely. But it has got a pretty simple workaround.

First, yes, I make sure their training schedule always keeps their armor on. It's also shown as the 'Ready' status, once you have it activated. Then you never have to worry about them taking the armor off 99% of the time.

Next, I do have them set to 'wear armor over clothes'. I let them equip everything they can (and yeah this often means they are assigned their steel high boots but won't wear them, because they're already wearing shoes and you can't put the boots on overtop the shoes).

So once they have grabbed everything else, I briefly switch the individual dwarf with problematic footgear over to 'armor replaces clothing'. This causes them to drop their clothes including the offending shoes, and go to grab their boots. Once everything is green, I switch them back to 'wear armor over clothes'. They will rush back to where they dropped their clothes and put them all back on (except the shoes that they can't wear because now they have the boots). They will often carry their shoes either to storage or back to their bedroom cabinet.

From there they are usually good for long periods of time, until they get into a fight where a boot gets knocked off, or better equipment is made that they want to switch to, or the various bugs that happen when they come back from an offsite raid, etc, and they might lose track of their boots and pick up shoes again. If that happens I just repeat the process - switch that dwarf to 'armor replaces clothing' again, have them grab the new boots, then back to 'wear armor over clothes' and we're good again for a long while.

As I said, fiddly. I typically only need to do this once per dwarf in the militia squads on initial setup, and then sporadically and rarely in the years afterward (there are some dwarves that seem more prone to grabbing shoes than others but I haven't tracked it to any particular personality trait yet).

If the clothes underneath their armor get worn... as far as I have noticed they *do* replace their clothes with new ones if available. However I don't watch this super-closely.

One thing I'd like to try sometime but I haven't yet, is actually assigning them clothes as *part* of the armor uniform, then see if that has an effect on whether they replace the clothing pieces that get worn. In that situation, if all pieces of clothes including stuff like loincloths and socks are part of the uniform, then I could probably set 'armor replaces clothes' permanently and never have to worry about the shoes/boots shuffle anymore.

[Saiko Kila]

One thing I'd like to try sometime but I haven't yet, is actually assigning them clothes as *part* of the armor uniform, then see if that has an effect on whether they replace the clothing pieces that get worn. In that situation, if all pieces of clothes including stuff like loincloths and socks are part of the uniform, then I could probably set 'armor replaces clothes' permanently and never have to worry about the shoes/boots shuffle anymore.

I have a setup like this (some clothes are part of uniform and armor replaces clothing), unfortunately they don't replace the decaying clothing on their own. So once it is a XXcloakXX it may be a good idea to replace it manually. And I mean selecting a particular new item, because otherwise they will drop the old, tattered thing, only to select it again if you just specify "cloak" and update uniform.

[anewaname]

Non-metal outer-layer armors (bone greaves, leather armor, shell helm, etc) also give happy thoughts and do not degrade except through combat. It is risky against metal weapons, but if you put many of your civilians into squads so they will wear some armor, it is good enough against wildlife and it is light.